Read more
List of contents
Preface
1. Introduction: What is a critical theory of nature?
2: Marx’s three materialisms
3: Natural history and the primacy of the object
4: Capitalism and the domination of nature
5: Marx, value and nature
6: Constellations and natural science
7: Eco-Marxism’s return to Marx
8. World-ecology and the persistence of non-Cartesian dualism
9: New materialism and dark ecology
10: Utopia, the apocalypse and praxis
References
About the author
Carl Cassegård is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where he is currently researching environmental activism. He is the author of Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan (2014) and Shock and Naturalization (2007). He has co-edited Climate Action in a Globalizing World (2017) and written numerous articles on critical theory.
Summary
Challenging the normalization of a capitalist reality in which environmental destruction and catastrophe have become ‘second nature’, Towards a Critical Theory of Nature offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current crisis via the work of the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on core Marxist concepts to confirm humanity’s central place in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers of the Frankfurt school, including, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt, are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural.
Further theoretical claims and practical consequences of a critical theory of nature challenge other contemporary theoretical approaches like eco-Marxism, social constructivism and new materialism, to situate it as the only approach with genuinely radical potential. The possibility of utopian idealism for understanding and responding to the current climate crisis is carefully measured against the dangers of false hope in setting out realistic goals for change. Environmental change in turn is seen through the prism of recent cultural currents and movements, situating the power of a critical theory of nature in relation to understandings of the Anthropocene; concepts of apocalypse, and postapocalypse. This book culminates in a powerful tool for an anti-capitalist critique of society’s painfully extractive relationship to a deceptively abstracted natural world.
Foreword
Demonstrates the fruitfulness of the ideas of the early Frankfurt School for developing a critical theory of nature.
Additional text
Catastrophic climate events are already happening. Cassegård finds in Adorno a critical theory of nature that highlights our destructive behaviour even as it reminds us that we are part of the nature that we are destroying. He asks us to struggle on the side of nature to tame capitalism.
